criclebrity lookeylikey of the day

Here's a timely one with the Ashes series in Australia about to kick off (tonight, in fact) and all England supporters filled with a mixture of trepidation (the last three Australian Ashes series have finished 5-0, 4-0, 4-0 in Australia's favour) and that most crippling and corrosive of all emotions, hope. I suppose a good start would be the series not being effectively over after the very first ball as it was last time. 

Anyway, here's England's unexpected nemesis from last time Scott Boland and actor Wes Bentley, one of the breakout stars of the multi-Oscar-winning American Beauty, a film which seems to have had a sharp (and probably partly Spacey-related) drop-off in critical regard in the last couple of decades but which I recall seeing a couple of times and quite enjoying, while noting that it seemed to think itself slightly cleverer and deeper than it probably actually was. One odd thing about it, though, is that all three of the young actors who were shot to stardom after playing major roles - Bentley, Thora Birch and Mena Suvari - have, while continuing to work in films, receded into relative obscurity since and not become the major stars that everyone predicted they would be. Bentley seems to have navigated the standard actorly route of sudden colossal stardom -> drug addiction, extreme mental derangement -> sobriety, return to regular film work prototyped by Robert Downey jr. among others. The only thing I'm aware of having seen him in since American Beauty is the remake of Pete's Dragon which also starred Robert Redford.

I'm not going to do a separate post for it, but we haven't done an "incidental music spot of the day" for a while so I will just draw your attention to the trailer linked above making use of Baba O'Riley by The Who, a song which has featured here before, back in 2007. 

the last book I read

The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers.

Brendan Doyle is just quietly minding his own business being a professor of English literature when a man comes to him with a modest proposal; join me on an assignment - a well-paid assignment, moreover - wherein your interest and expertise in the works of 19th-century poets will be of immense practical value. 

Well, that all sounds great, but what could the nature of this assignment possibly be that would require the services of an expert in early-19th-century English poetry? Ah, well, I'm glad you asked: I, elderly and eccentric millionaire J. Cochran Darrow, have somehow discovered a series of portals that permit travel between different locations in time and space. The nature of this wavily-defined thing is such that you don't have total control over the when and where, and it just happens that I've found a portal that will shortly (literally in a few hours from now) be accessible from our current location in 1983 Los Angeles and which links for a period of time with 1810 London and will permit a small group of customers, paying lavishly for the privilege, to travel there/then, hear an in-person lecture by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with extra context and biographical detail supplied by you, and then return home again. Pretty cool, huh?

A bit of exposition is offered by Darrow in the course of explaining the assignment to Doyle, and the reader also gets the benefit of a brief prologue set in 1802 wherein a couple of mysterious wielders of sorcery attempt to summon up the ancient Egyptian God Anubis, as you do, and succeed only in inflicting harm upon themselves and opening up a series of rents, "gates" if you will, in space-time radiating out in both directions from 1802 and allowing those possessed of the relevant arcane knowledge to travel between them.

So anyway, Darrow, Doyle, and various millionaire enthusiasts get dolled up in suitable period garb and travel back to 1810 to hear Coleridge speak; all goes pretty smoothly for everyone except Doyle, who is coshed senseless and abducted by mysterious persons who turn out to be, among others, Doctor Romany, one of the magicians associated with the 1802 shenanigans who is keen to understand and contain what's been unleashed. Doyle, having missed the window of opportunity to return to 1983, escapes and flees back into London.

But how to survive in early-19th-century London? Doyle finds his way into a loose guild of beggars and street thieves and is taken under the wing of the slightly Artful Dodger-esque Jacky. Meanwhile he is hatching a plan to make contact with another poet of the time, William Ashbless, whose more obscure oeuvre he has made a special study of, and whose documented movements he is familiar with to the extent of knowing that he'll be in a particular tavern in a day or two's time. 

Lots of plot strands here that we'll just summarise to save time: the mysterious Dog-Face Joe, seemingly able to swap bodies with unsuspecting individuals (who inherit the ruined shell of whatever body he was previously in, usually for a short period ended by its death) and the odd outbreak of seemingly insane short-lived hairy individuals attacking people around London all turn out to be aspects of the same thing, the continued existence of the other 1802 magician, Amenophis Fikee, after the events of that night evicted him from his original body. The first magician, Doctor Romany (the one who briefly abducted Doyle in 1810), is running a pickpocketing and murdering guild of his own, headquartered in some subterranean caverns connected to the sewer system and the Thames, and continuing his attempt to conjure up various Egyptian gods. Finally Darrow, Doyle's mysterious benefactor from 1983, has returned to 1810 and is using his knowledge of stock market performance in the intervening 173 years to make a fortune and negotiating with Dog-Face Joe aka Fikee to make use of his body-swapping knowledge to achieve eternal youth.

Keeping up? Excellent. So Doyle gets to experience first-hand knowledge of some of this when he is forcibly body-swapped in the tavern he'd gone to to meet Ashbless (who didn't show) and wakes up in a different body which has just taken a large dose of strychnine. Luckily Doyle has enough knowledge to be able to vomit up the poison and after a day or two is as right as rain and, moreover, inhabiting a body that's considerably younger and physically more imposing than his old one. Doyle soon realises that in some weird paradoxical time-travel accidentally-becoming-your-own-grandfather way he is actually William Ashbless. He's not sure what the magicians are up to but resolves to thwart them, with some help from some locals who are in the know. This involves a bewildering series of trips including a time-hop to 1684 and a brief trip by sea to Cairo to meet (and subsequently kill) the chief magician. Upon returning to London, Doyle/Ashbless, Jacky and, slightly bizarrely, a laudanum-crazed Samuel Taylor Coleridge are abducted into the subterranean caverns and, after some odd encounters with some of the mysterious creatures who also live down there (remnants of some botched magical experiments) and a couple of telling interventions from the Egyptian gods who the magicians have been bothering (notably the snake-god Apep), Jacky and Doyle/Ashbless are vomited out into the Thames while the magicians and their various minions are consumed by Apep and Ra and various other entities not best pleased at being bothered from their centuries-long slumber.

Doyle is now in the odd philosophical position of being free to live out the rest of his life as Ashbless while knowing, from his 20th-century studies, most of the biographical details up to and including the date and manner of his death (thankfully a few decades off yet). He also knows the name of his future wife and WAIT A MINUTE Jacky reveals to him that she's been a woman disguised as a man all along and her real name is, well, I expect you can join the dots here. Ashbless and the future Mrs. Ashbless link arms and head off to enjoy their future together, with only the small inconvenience of Ashbless already knowing pretty much all of it.

That was quite a long synopsis and you can see I had to skate over some of it - and omit some of it altogether, including the rationale for Jacky actually being an upper-class young woman disguised as a street urchin - lest this become the longest blog post ever. The TL;DR version would be: there's a lot going on here, possibly a bit too much to allow every plot contrivance to be tied up satisfactorily at the end. The nature of how the gates work is hand-waved away and while they're obviously important to the plot (important enough to give the book its title, after all) they're arguably just a contrivance to insert Doyle in 1810 where the rest of the action takes place. 

The important thing is not to worry about any of that too much and just be swept along by the action, and as long as you do that then this is generally a hoot. The committee that awards the annual Philip K Dick Award evidently thought so too, as The Anubis Gates was the winner in 1984. Powers won it again in 1986; his two wins sandwich the only other recipient I've read, William Gibson's Neuromancer. Powers is also known for his 1987 novel On Stranger Tides which was loosely adapted into the fourth Pirates Of The Caribbean film. 

Many echoes of other fictional works here, as you can imagine - here's a few:

• there is an odd parallel with the only other novel in the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks series to appear on this list, Time And Again, in that both start with our protagonist being approached by someone he doesn't know and offered a large sum of money to make use of some ill-defined time-travel device to travel to the 19th century and carry out an assignment.
• a couple of weird parallels with the work of Douglas Adams: firstly the use of Coleridge as a plot device, with the suggestion that some of his experiences may have bled through (facilitated by his heroic opium intake) into his later poetry, is similar to what happens in The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul, the second Dirk Gently novel [postscript: it was actually the first one, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. In my defence it's a long time since I read either of them]. Secondly both The Anubis Gates and the later novels in the Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy series feature a plot device of the main character having foreknowledge relating to his own death. In Ashbless' case it's the date and circumstances, in Arthur Dent's case it's knowing that he can't die yet because he hasn't visited the nightclub on Stavromula Beta where he carries out one of his multiple accidental murders of the creature Agrajag.
• the idea of a ka as a sort of disembodied vital essence is familiar from the works of Dennis Wheatley, in particular his 1956 novel The Ka Of Gifford Hillary (which I have never read). In the particular context of The Anubis Gates its meaning is extended to a sort of animated copy of a person conjured from the usual blood/hair combo and therefore a bit more like a golem. It was also used (with some further twisting of its original meaning) by Stephen King in the Dark Tower series.
• the body-swapping thing, in particular - as I put it elsewhere - the "unceremonious yeeting" of the body's previous occupant, is a device used in Ancillary Justice and more briefly in Transition.

Tim Powers provides the latest in a shortish series of different authors on this list who share a surname. Here are the ones I've spotted on a brief trawl of the archives, in no particular order:

• Tim Powers and Richard Powers
• Iain (M) Banks and Russell Banks
• Jim Harrison and M John Harrison
• Graham Swift and Jonathan Swift
• Ali Smith, Alexander McCall Smith and Michael Marshall Smith - depending of course how your surname-classification rules work
• F Scott Fitzgerald and Penelope Fitzgerald - as above

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Seen on Facebook this week, this short video inviting "wrong answers only" to the question of who the mystery golfer is. There's limited fun in this, as his identity is revealed in the caption at the bottom, but I do have a suggestion. So here's Swedish golfer Jesper Parnevik (for it is he, sporting a moustache and bouffant hairdo combo that he didn't have during his prime playing days of the late 1990s and early 2000s) and American novelist Kurt Vonnegut.

I've no idea of the date of the footage; I don't want to assume it's recent just because the algorithm threw it into my timeline in the last couple of days. All I can tell you is that Parnevik didn't have the 'tache/'fro combo when he bagged his only PGA Champions Tour victory in 2016, so it's probably more recent than that. He doesn't play much these days.

Anyway, both of these guys have featured on this blog before: Vonnegut twice as a book featuree (Cat's Cradle and The Sirens Of Titan) and prior to both of those on the occasion of his death in April 2007, and Parnevik in the course of a throwaway aside at the end of this post about Ayers Rock/Uluru in late 2019. Parnevik also continues the strong tradition of golfers featuring in this category, as evidenced most recently just a couple of months ago. 

sudeley, life has new meaning to me

Part two of the mappage catchuppage features a couple of lower-level walks, though not without summit-conquering of a sort, as you may have already seen if you looked at the photo gallery I linked to in the last post. 

Anyway, back in June a group of us decided to get together for a weekend away, as we didn't get to see each other very often for the usual middle-aged reasons: gradual geographical dispersion, kids to be fed and entertained, increasing physical decrepitude, male pattern baldness, piles, gout, etc. We hired an AirBnB in Winchcombe, Gloucestershire with the intention of doing some walking in the Cotswolds and a bit of eating and drinking and general hanging out, shooting the shit and all that. It fell to Steffen and myself to do most of the route-organising and I think we did a pretty decent job, coming up with a long walk on day 1 when we had all day and a slightly shorter one for day 2 when everyone wanted to be on the road back by mid-afternoon. 

Day 1 comprised a 20-kilometre clockwise circular walk starting and finishing at the house and encompassing the highest parts of the entire Costwold group of hills as well as a couple of other points of interest including the Bela's Knap long barrow. The high plateau of Cleeve Hill and Cleeve Common is a pleasant place to be, especially in the warm sunny weather we were fortunate enough to have. Another pleasant place to be is the Rising Sun in Cleeve Hill village where we stopped for a couple of refreshing pints (Otter ales, if I remember rightly) and some light lunch. 

The actual high point of the day, and indeed of the Costwolds as a whole, is the summit of Cleeve Hill at a fairly modest 330 metres (1080 feet). The actual summit is a fairly anonymous trig point a couple of hundred yards from a car park and a couple of radio masts (you can see it marked with a "330" at the bottom of the map below); the grander viewpoint with a single tree, some memorial plaques and benches, another trig point and a toposcope a kilometre or so to the north-west is more impressive, but a few metres lower. Crucially this is also the county high point of Gloucestershire, which enables me to tick that off on my list. Going purely by the county list linked in that magazine article, and not getting involved in an argument about the sense of listing long-defunct counties like Huntingdonshire and Merionethshire, my list currently comprises the following:

England

• Berkshire
• Cornwall
• Cumberland
• Derbyshire
• Devon
• Dorset
• Gloucestershire
• Herefordshire
• Lancashire
• Somerset
• Westmorland

Wales

• Brecknockshire
• Caernarfonshire
• Cardiganshire
• Carmarthenshire
• Monmouthshire
• Pembrokeshire

Scotland

• Aberdeenshire
• Banffshire
• Inverness-shire
• Stirlingshire

In need of sustenance after the walk we had an evening in Winchcombe which included visits to the White Hart and Plaisterer's Arms and a curry afterwards. All very nice, as is the food in the White Hart where those of us who'd come down on the Friday night to wring maximum possible value out of the weekend had gone for dinner.

We had to check out of the house on Sunday morning, so we decided to start day 2's walk a mile or so down the road at Sudeley Castle, which fortunately has a nice big (and free) car park which you don't feel too guilty about making use of without actually visiting the buildings ("castle" is a bit of a stretch; it's a large country house). Sudeley is mainly famous for being the home of Catherine Parr, widow of Henry VIII; she moved there upon remarrying after Henry's death and is buried in the grounds. I must admit I was ignorant of what happened to her after Henry's death, in particular that she'd subsequently married Thomas Seymour, brother of Henry's third wife, Jane Seymour, and that for all the "divorced, beheaded, survived" stuff she only outlived Henry by about a year and a half, dying of complications from childbirth in September 1548 at the age of thirty-six.

I would describe this as a pleasant country ramble, memorable for being spent in excellent company and very pleasant weather rather than for anything exceptional about the details. The eleven or so kilometres (clockwise again; gently uphill for the first half, gently downhill for the second) got us back to the car park just after lunchtime and we eased our collective conscience about the car park situation by buying an ice cream from the cafe before heading off home. A few photos from the weekend can be found here.

the path of least resistance

Following on from the Blorenge and Scottish walks described in earlier posts, a few more maps I spotted in my collection from recent outings and which I thought might warrant a mention here. Firstly, Pen y Fan. Now you'll probably be aware that I've featured ascents of this particular mountain a few times before on this blog; I won't attempt to collate all of them but you might start here, here, here and here. But it is, let's not forget, the highest mountain in Southern Britain, a slightly woolly claim but one which essentially means that if you draw a horizontal line on a map of Britain a few feet south of the summit of Cadair Idris, as I've done below, the highest point in the region south of that line is indeed the summit of Pen y Fan. Yes, granted, you've defined your terms in such a way as to get the answer you want, but it's not an insignificant thing. 

Anyway, sometimes you want to find new and interesting ways to get up and down (and you almost always can), but sometimes you just want to smash up, bag it, smash down again, bish bosh, sorted. Other considerations are who else is coming along on the walk and how much gratuitous extra distance and effort they'll be prepared to tolerate without getting all whiny and annoying, and indeed who is in charge of route planning. I get a bit twitchy if this isn't me, but sometimes it isn't and you have to take an attitude of Zen-like acceptance in the face of whatever ill-thought-out bullshit other people come up with.

Examples, you say? Gladly. Here is the walk we did for my birthday back in February, a time of year when I get a free one-off opportunity to annoy everybody by making them do an activity of my choosing, which of course is going to be some tedious outdoorsy shit. So I'd proposed a trip up Pen Y Fan, which Nia had done a couple of times before but neither Alys nor Huwie had. I can't remember whether we'd done any advance planning for the Scotland trip at this stage but I might have had the thought of using it as a warm-up for the more strenuous mountain walking that would be involved there. My sister-in-law and brother-in-law and their two boys wanted to come as well, so I thought I'd better play it safe and just do one of the quick routes. So we parked up in the recently-expanded Pont ar Daf car park and did a circular route up via the path from Storey Arms and back down the main path which terminates at the car park, a round trip of a little over eight kilometres, or five miles if you prefer, in a clockwise direction on the map below.

What's very obviously apparent both from looking at the contours and the altitude chart a couple of kilometres in, and indeed from listening to the chorus of complaining from my fellow walkers, is that the forced loss and regain of around sixty metres in height in order to traverse the mini-valley containing the Blaen Taf-fawr stream is a bit of a motivation-killer early doors, just as it's a bit of an unwelcome sting in the tail at the end of a fifteen-mile bi-directional traverse of the main Beacons ridge.

Simple, you'll be saying, just use that prominently-marked green path that swings up to the north and, at the cost of maybe an extra half a kilometre across the ground, stays on the contours the whole way. And my answer to that is I'd love to, but it's not really discernible, still less signposted, any more. If you look at Google Maps' satellite view, really zoom in, and squint a bit you can just about convince yourself that there might be a scratch in the ground resembling a path, and if you drop the StreetView man right at the start of the path up from Storey Arms you might just about make out a grassy track ascending through a break in the heather on the left, but I have walked past here a few times, and past where the path supposedly rejoins the main path at the Tommy Jones obelisk, without noticing anything obvious. Next time I'm up there in reasonable weather with no pressing need to keep anyone else fed or entertained I'm going to have a look for it though.

Similarly, while the OS map shows a few alternative paths either side of the main route up from Pont ar Daf, none of those are discernible any longer at ground level. This will be largely because of the considerable path maintenance and landscaping effort that's gone on alongside the car park improvements to reduce the amount of erosion along these heavily-used routes. That does create a feedback loop, though, in that people will then be constrained, or at least heavily encouraged, to only using those routes for ascent rather than fanning out over a number of different routes to the same end-point, and perhaps reducing wear on any individual one. 

A couple of schools of thought on this one; Cameron McNeish, author of a couple of excellent books on Scottish mountain walking that I own, is a fervent advocate of people being, as he puts it, goats rather than sheep and making their own ways up, on the grounds that this reduces wear and tear and prevents a single furrow being worn into the ground that then needs repair and reinforcement. I'm quite sympathetic to this viewpoint, though the counter-example I would offer is Waun Fach in the Black Mountains, recent-ish recipient of exactly the sort of hard landscaping and path constraining that McNeish decries, but which I don't think anyone could rationally say is a worse place to be on top of now than before. 

My second ascent of Pen y Fan this year was as part of the I Am Pen y Fan charity challenge organised by SightLife, the charity my wife works for, and at the start of which we were seen off by charity patron Ceri Dupree, who didn't join us for the walk as the fabulous sequined Welsh flag dress he was wearing would have been rather constricting, not to mention a bit chilly on a wet and windy day. You will see from the summit photo that Huwie resolutely rocked a green sequined tailcoat the whole way to the top as a tribute, though. 

Route-wise this was as vanilla as it gets, just straight up and back from the car park, with a small loop on the way up for those who deemed it desirable and/or necessary (i.e. pretty much just me and the kids) to bag Corn Du. The summit photo I've reproduced above also features in this ongoing Twitter thread and in the recently-updated mega-gallery of trig points and mountain summits. 

the last book I read

Trio by William Boyd.

Here's Elfrida Wing, blearily coming downstairs on a summer morning in 1968 for a nutritious breakfast of some orange juice with a good solid slug of vodka in it, just to set her up for another day of not getting round to writing a novel to follow up her previous one, published a good ten years earlier. The vodka is from one of various secret stashes hidden around the house, although there's currently no need for any subterfuge because husband Reggie is off directing a movie in Brighton. 

Here's Talbot Kydd, producer of Reggie's movie, which goes by the tremendously late-1960s title of Emily Bracegirdle's Extremely Useful Ladder To The Moon. Talbot is a sixtyish ex-army chap, married, couple of grown-up children, but starting to experience unexpected Feelings, you know, Down There, which suggest to him that the life of a regular vanilla heterosexual might not actually be his thing after all. 

And here's Anny Viklund, American actress and star of Reggie and Talbot's movie. A complicated girl with a complicated past involving a bit of a thing for older men into political activism, from her most recent boyfriend Jacques, a French philosopher, to her ex-husband Cornell, a proper domestic terrorist responsible for some actual bombings on American soil and currently a fugitive from justice. Anny is taking a break from all this complicated stuff by having some nice uncomplicated sex with her co-star, a nice uncomplicated bloke called Troy Blaze (not his real name), a pop star trying to break into acting. 

Elfrida hatches an idea to kick her writer's block into touch - no, don't be silly, not cutting down on the sauce, but instead using a real-life fellow writer's life as the framework for a novel. That way some of the plot takes care of itself, and best of all she has a ready-made candidate in mind: Virginia Woolf. Not only were some of Elfrida's early novels loosely compared by critics with Woolf's work, but there's an obvious hook to hang the new book's plot on: Woolf's suicide by drowning in 1941.

Work on the film, meanwhile, continues, with some script doctoring being done by another, younger novelist, Janet Headstone, with whom Reggie is also having an affair. Anny and Troy continue with their acting duties by day and blissful fucking by night until Anny has an unexpected encounter outside her hotel with her ex-husband Cornell, unexpectedly in England and in need of money for some murky scheme that will enable him to evade the hands of the CIA and FBI. Panicking, and keen to get rid of him, she agrees, hoping that handing over a wad of cash will be the end of things. Which, of course, it isn't, as only a few days later the British police and an FBI guy turn up asking awkward questions. Panicking some more, Anny gives them the slip and flees to France, where she can throw herself on the mercy of Jacques, only too keen to help as it offers him an opportunity to a) get back into her knickers in return and b) give the American and British imperialist pigdogs a bloody nose.

This is not great news for anyone involved with the film, though, as it's not finished yet and Anny still has some scenes left to shoot. Talbot hires a private investigator, Ken Kincade, to accompany him to France and try to find her. Kincade is a man of unconventional style and methods but remarkably effective at his job, and also, as an openly gay man (something only very recently possible in 1968), possessed of a sensitive enough gaydar to detect Talbot's inner turmoil and probe him (no, not in that way) about it a bit. Not neglecting the day job, though, he soon tracks down Anny who is hiding out in Jacques' brother's apartment.

Meanwhile Elfrida is experiencing a dwindling of the brief excitement that accompanied her hatching of the Virginia Woolf idea, and moreover is starting to experience some weird side-effects of her epic booze consumption, not just the usual ones of passing out and pissing oneself but also some weirder things like imagining things crawling under her skin. She has also - somewhat belatedly - come to the realisation that Reggie is sleeping with Janet Headstone and in a fit of depression decides to don a heavy overcoat, load the pockets up with rocks, and emulate Virginia Woolf's suicide in the River Ouse. After not even managing to pull this off successfully Elfrida decides that she has hit bottom and it's time to seek help, which turns out to be a nunnery thinly disguised as a rehab facility.

Meanwhile Anny, feeling the net closing in from both Talbot and the FBI, takes off again in Jacques' brother's car, intending to head for Spain but ending up in Cap Ferret, which if you do the right accent sounds like it ought to be in Yorkshire but is actually in south-western France. Surely she'll be safe from her pursuers here?

Talbot, having failed to persuade Anny to return to Brighton and fulfil her contractual obligations, cooks up an alternative ending to the film with Reggie and Janet (one that doesn't require any further contributions from Anny), sells up his stake in the film production company and decides on some radical re-invention of his life, starting with the burly scaffolder who did some work on his house, narrowly avoided dropping some heavy ironmongery on his head, and has definitely been giving him the eye. 

So by the end all three have undergone some major life re-alignments, more so in one case than the other two. I will restrict myself to a PARTIAL PLOT SPOILER ALERT here by merely saying that one of the principal trio of characters dies at the end, without saying which one it is; it might not be the one you expect. Or maybe it is?

This is the seventh William Boyd novel on this list and so we very much know what to expect by now. This one departs slightly from the pattern followed by the big biographical epics like Any Human Heart and Sweet Caress by having multiple viewpoints (three in fact; the title is a bit of a giveaway), but follows them in being smart, occasionally funny, having interesting and believable characters and straddling the line between what you might call "popular" and "literary" fiction, if you insisted on drawing a line where no such thing really exists. It's probably not as good as some of the others, partly because the multiple-viewpoints thing and the book's relative shortness (just over 300 pages) mean that it doesn't feel like we really get to spend enough time with any of the main characters. Boyd clearly had a lot of fun with the 1960s period-specific stuff and the recreation of the film industry setting, something he has direct experience of. As with any William Boyd book it's highly readable and entertaining; Brazzaville Beach and The Blue Afternoon remain the ones, though.

the last book I read

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin.

Meet D-503, presumably D to his friends as these really seem to be the only names people have; it's not like he's Chad at weekends or anything. He is a resident (a "cipher" in their terminology) of the One State, a totalitarian regime that has sprung up in the wake of a planet-scouring apocalypse of the usual sort - or, I suppose, maybe the One State already existed and brought about the planet-scouring apocalypse as a means of eradicating rival states. Anyway, whatever, the population of the planet has been reduced to some small percentage of its previous level (the text is a bit slippery with terminology so there's some disagreement over whether this means 20%, 2%, 0.2% or something else) and the boundaries of the One State are delimited by some pretty serious walls to keep the usual hairy-tentacled mutant hordes out.

The usual totalitarian rules apply here: everyone lives in apartments with semi-transparent walls so no-one can get up to any nefarious business without other people knowing about it, outside of the regular scheduled sex visits from one's designated fuck-buddy to keep morale up and perpetuate the species. Everyone must be seen to contribute to the public good, otherwise you may attract the attention of the various enforcers of the State's will, a thing you really don't want to do. That attention culminates in gruesome public executions of those ciphers deemed to be beyond redemption. 

D-503 is all right, though, being a high-ranking scientist and mathematician and chief engineer of the Integral, a spaceship being built to facilitate the expansion of the One State and the exertion of its will to other planets. In his downtime D-503 enjoys some nice commitment-free sex - at pre-approved times and locations only, of course - with his designated partner O-90. 

So that's all pretty sweet and only an idiot could fuck it up, right? Well, enter I-330, a free-spirited and unconventional woman much given to inappropriate flirting, smoking and drinking (both prohibited) for whom D-503 has an instant uggghh/phwoarrr revulsion/attraction thing and finds himself arranging clandestine meetings with at the Ancient House, a sort of Museum Of The Before Times which has actual walls and is therefore used by political agitators as a secret base. During one of these meetings a secret tunnel is revealed which lead to the world outside the Wall, a lush green (though possibly slightly radioactive) paradise where recognisable humans and more exotic hairy hominids live in apparent peace and harmony.

Back inside the city D-503's slightly erratic behaviour is causing some awkward questions to be asked, and more generally there are rumblings of societal upheaval and small acts of civic disobedience among the ciphers. To combat this the people in charge have come up with a great scheme: troubled by intrusive thoughts of an independent and questioning nature? Come in to one of our re-orientation centres where these thoughts will be removed from you via our new and wholly benign free operation which will induce calm and untroubled thoughts by the simple application of a few hundred volts to your frontal lobes. And the best part is it's completely voluntary, by which we mean obligatory.

Opting out of the first wave of willing victims trooping into the re-orientation centres to be lobotomised, D-503 takes the Integral on its maiden flight, which is disrupted by I-330 and her associates; this does give D-503 pause to wonder whether she was just using him to gain access to the rocket. No time for too much thinking about that, though, as the craft returns to earth and everyone is arrested. D-503 confesses everything and is allowed to live on in a state of bovine compliance after having the Operation; I-330 refuses to rat out her co-conspirators and is publicly executed. Meanwhile civil unrest continues, the Wall is breached and some people are inconvenienced by hooting gibbons in the course of their daily duties. Can peace and order be restored, or is the One State doomed?

It's literally impossible to do any background reading around material relating to We (i.e. before actually reading the book) that doesn't prominently mention its influence on later works such as Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four - for context, We was first published in 1924, Brave New World in 1932 and Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949. I should say at this point that my memories of Brave New World are fairly hazy as it's probably thirty years since I read it, but the setting of We - bright science-y utopia with the harsher totalitarian stuff bubbling beneath the surface - is probably closer to Brave New World than to Nineteen Eighty-Four's grimy setting and everyone existing on a diet of cabbage and gin. That said, there are some clear plot parallels in Nineteen Eighty-Four, most obviously the mild-mannered central male character being led astray by a bolshy and unconventional female love interest (I-330 here, Julia there) in a way that leads to their mutual downfall.

So you can chalk up another book on this list most of whose action occurs after some vaguely-described apocalypse, in this case (as in many others) probably nuclear. An informal and probably incomplete list can be found at the end of the Fiskadoro review. It's fascinating to compare We with the better-known books that came after and clearly derived some influence from it, but it's a fascinating novel in its own right as well, and of course Zamyatin's experience of the sort of regime being described and satirised here was a bit more direct than either Huxley or Orwell's, since he lived through the birth of the Soviet Union and had publication of We forbidden there until long after his death. Possibly for that reason We leans a bit more into the satire and blackly wry humour than either of the two other books. 

My Vintage paperback comes, in a somewhat bizarre sales gimmick, with a supposedly 3-D cover with a pair of 3-D glasses attached. At least it says they're included on the cover, but I can't remember whether I actually got a pair when I acquired the book (as a Christmas or birthday present I think). As a consequence I can't tell you whether the faces and text on the cover loom out at you in an alarming fashion when you put the glasses on, but I did not find that this had very much bearing on my enjoyment of the book, luckily.

leanston, meanston, deanston

Better do this whisky post before the bottle disappears - a very real danger as it's the only one in the cupboard at the moment. The brief glory days of immediately post-birthday (supplemented by the Christmas backlog) have long since been whittled away and we're into the long dark teatime of the soul that precedes Christmas 2025 and hopefully a bit of a bump in the stocks.

Anyway, this is Deanston, not one that you see in supermarkets a lot, although I seem to remember Marks & Spencer used to sell it. I happened to see it on the spesh for about £25 on Amazon a while back so I decided to snap it up; I mean, why not, right?

Deanston distillery is located a few miles west of Dunblane, fairly southerly as Highland distilleries go though not as far south as Glengoyne. It's a fairly young distillery, being opened in 1965, but inhabits a set of buildings with an interesting history which were used as a cotton mill for around 200 years before being re-purposed for whisky production. 

This is the entry-level Virgin Oak expression, the name referencing the year or so the whisky spends in new oak casks which have never before held any spirit. This alone would not qualify the spirit to be called Scotch whisky, as it must first be matured for at least three years in casks that have previously held some other spirit; in this case American bourbon. So you might say, well, this whole Virgin Oak thing sounds like a bit of a gimmick then, and I'd say, yes, you may be right there. In their defence it is bottled at a beefy 46.3% which represents some commitment to delivering a bit of oomph at the cost of wringing out a bit of extra profit. It would be easy enough, after all, to just dilute the whole thing down to the standard 40% and squeeze out roughly an extra bottle for every seven or so bottles at 46.3%, so respect to them for not doing that. They also make a big thing on the packaging of it being non-chill-filtered, and there are no cryptic messages in foreign languages which denote the inclusion of extra colouring. There is, as it happens, a slightly complex relationship between chill-filtering and the bottling strength of your whisky which I won't attempt to explain but which you can read about here.

All that don't amount to a hill of beans if your whisky tastes like donkey ass, though, in fact slightly more concentrated donkey ass might even be a bad thing. No worries on that particular score, though. I mean it's not especially startling, adhering to the present-day standard of being a no-age-statement whisky sitting below the 12-year-old which they are thereby able to charge more money for and which I don't deem myself able to afford what with having kids to feed and all that malarkey.

But, to be fair, there's nothing wrong with it, any more than there's anything wrong with a whole host of unpeated Highland and Speyside whiskies that I'd struggle to tell apart in a blind taste test. I'd put this in the top half of the imaginary chart, because it's got some nice dried-fruit spiciness going on. A sploosh of water doesn't hurt here, especially since the higher bottling strength means it won't damp the aforementioned oomph down too much.

slider way, give it all you got

Here's a crackpot theory for you, and, as all the best theories do, it has to do with Robert Redford, who died last week at the age of 89, and shoes.

The only films in which Redford starred which I could say with complete confidence that I've seen are Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, The Sting, All The President's Men, The Great Waldo Pepper, Out Of Africa and Pete's Dragon. The first three there are obviously classics, the fourth is a bit of fluff with some surprisingly dark moments thrown in (such as Susan Sarandon falling off an aeroplane, or when Redford's character has to cave a fellow aviator's head in with a hunk of timber to prevent him burning to death in his crashed plane), the fifth is a bit turgid for my taste and I can't honestly remember Redford even being in the last one, presumably because I was distracted by a giant furry green CGI dragon.

Anyway, the central point made in a number of the obituaries was that it was easily to be distracted from his acting ability by how absurdly handsome he was, something easy even for a tediously vanilla heterosexual bloke such as myself to appreciate. That is something that Redford himself complained about (but not too much; I mean, come on) in the context of it limiting his range of roles. The quote that was circulating on the internet after his death was this one from director Mike Nichols in relation to Redford being considered for the role that eventually went to Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate:

“I interviewed hundreds, maybe thousands, of men,” Nichols explained. “I said, ‘You can’t play it. You can never play a loser.’ And Redford said, ‘What do you mean? Of course I can play a loser.’ And I said, ‘O.K., have you ever struck out with a girl?’ and he said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he wasn’t joking.” 

What you might be asking at this point is: yes, but what does all this have to do with shoes? Well, I'll tell you. I was at Newport Leisure Centre the other day taking the girls to a swimming lesson, and there were several people there sporting what these days seems to be quite a common footwear combo of shortish white sports socks pulled up quite tight, and sliders. I assume the original idea was to give some sort of post-training-session Premiership footballer vibe, but it seems pretty ubiquitous now. One of the Dads who was supervising the activities of his child in the showers even had socks and sliders on and must have been getting wet socks. 

So, getting to the point, my thesis is this: there are two sorts of people in the world, with two fundamentally different sorts of outlook on it, and life. The first sort either apply absolutely no thought whatsoever to what might happen beyond two minutes from now, or have a sort of blithe assurance that all will be well, nothing can or will go wrong, and they won't ever get into a position where they get stranded (e.g. if the car breaks down) on the way home from the swimming run and have to hike across a field in the dark in sliders, flip-flops, whatever. The other group of people assume that these things may well happen and that some more robust ready-for-anything footwear may be required. I myself for instance do own a pair of flip-flops, but they are strictly for home or holiday use and never worn in any situation where I might be required to do anything involving walking any significant distance or driving a car. I might wear my Converses or Vans if I'm in a cazh mood and the weather is warm and dry, with the caveat that I probably wouldn't wear the Converses for the swimming run as the thin canvas material and those two little instep holes mean they suck up water pretty effectively.

Looking at it another way I think this probably also divides down the nerd/jock boundary, where the nerd contingent might be slightly more inclined to get into the habit of wearing shoes that facilitate a quick getaway in the event of trouble. To put it another way, people who might feel a need to escape from other people (anyone who was ever bullied at school, for instance) might be more inclined to wear escape-facilitating footwear than those who might more generally expect other people to run away from them.

The pursuer/pursuee (yeah, I know, not really a word) model works for linking this back to Robert Redford as well - imagine (if you can) being someone who looked like him. I don't want to use the phrase "beating them off with a shitty stick" but it seems pretty appropriate here; it's hard to imagine him ever having to expend very much effort to be in the company of someone who wanted to get into his pants. The only advantage for the rest of us who might have to work slightly harder is that (this is what I choose to believe, anyway) since we had to work a bit harder at attracting a partner in the first place, and additionally might have more of an incentive to keep them around, we might be more inclined to generosity and attention to detail in the bedroom department, if you know what I mean, ladies. 

a salt with a deadly ramen

There I was, enjoying a piping-hot mid-week bowl of lunchtime noodles as I am occasionally to be found doing, only to have my wife come into the kitchen and say, hahaha, the internet says those will probably kill you. This was unexpected and slightly unwelcome news to me, as I'd been scrupulously careful, as I always am, to avoid the risk of accidentally shooting myself in the nuts with multiple rockets during the noodle-preparation process. 

As always, once I'd gone and checked out the article Hazel had seen on the internet it turns out the reality is slightly less exciting than the headlines suggest, the shock revelation being that primarily noodle-based meals are quite high in carbohydrates (I mean, no shit) but are also extremely high in salt. This latter observation is undoubtedly true, as the 3.6 grams of salt that a standard packet of the Nong Shim ramen noodles contains constitutes around 60% of an adult's recommended daily intake. 

Yeah, you'll be saying, I see that, but that's surely only a problem if you're eating these things every day. And you are right, of course, but the whole variety and moderation thing doesn't generate those sweet sweet clicks that food websites crave even more than another delicious bowl of spicy noodles. So, for that reason, someone went and did the diligence and ate nothing but a variety of packets of ramen noodles for a week, and arrived at the shock revelation that it's probably not a great idea. This is its very own sub-genre of internet food "journalism", as you can see, some of the stunts probably being more toxic and inadvisable than others. I'm not sure when this all started but I think Morgan Spurlock may be at least partly to blame.

I was moved to wonder what the current rates of noodle consumption are here at Halibut Towers - this is more difficult to calculate over the last few years than it was back when I was tracking it in a serious way, because Wing Yip have closed their online store and I spent a couple of years trawling the far reaches of the internet for noodle bargains before returning to Amazon in the last couple of years. In any case, the numbers from back in, say, 2014 are meaningless in comparison with today's numbers, since we're now up to three enthusiastic noodle-consumers in the house. Nia and Huwie are on a couple of bowls a week on average, and if I have a couple as well that's very nearly a bowl a day between us on aggregate. Alys, contrarian as always, does not relish them.

That finger-in-the-air estimate is borne out by my recent Amazon order history, which shows that we collectively consumed 440 packets in 584 days between January 2024 and August 2025. I have no data on our collective sodium levels or blood pressure, and that's probably just as well.

My only hope here is that the mild scepticism about a perhaps-too-simplistic link between salt intake and blood pressure expressed in the excellent book The Man Who Ate Everything turns out to be true. Even if it isn't, this is a hugely entertaining read which I recommend highly.

I don't have a lot of food-related book recommendations but I would also suggest you read Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, a bit more of a downer but fascinating and well worth a go.

you don't know jack

Following on from the last book post and its predecessor, I observed at the end of the Jack Maggs review that its title was the latest in a short series of titles that were just someone's full name. A similar list could be constructed for Jack, its exact composition depending on the rules we decide to specify. Most obviously we could make a list of books whose title is a single word which is clearly someone's given name, or a near-variant or diminutive form of it (Jack Boughton's given name is actually John, for instance).

If we did that, and with the caveat that this may not be exhaustive, since that would require a degree of effort and attention to detail that I can't be arsed with, we'd end up with a list that went something like: Jack, Dalva, Lila, Rebecca, Beloved, Fremder, Clea, Walter, Lolita, Balthazar, Justine. 

If we included single-word names that were pretty clearly someone's surname then we might end up adding these: Ravelstein, Stoner, Mountolive, Demian, Chatterton, Kleinzeit, Utz.

Finally, single-word names that clearly refer to a particular person but which are some sort of nickname rather than strictly a given name: Candide, Fiskadoro, Nostromo, Lanark, Stick, Pilgermann. 

A full analysis, should you require one, of one-word, two-word and indeed many-word titles featured on this blog can be found here.

the last book I read

Jack by Marilynne Robinson.

So here is John Ames Boughton aka Jack, who you'll recall we met in Home and Gilead and who was an occasional off-screen presence in Lila, and who was in many ways the most interesting character in those books, having a murky past involving various unforgivable misdemeanours, much dissolution and misbehaviour and equally much saintly patience and forbearance from his father and siblings. Well here he is getting a whole book to himself, or mostly to himself.

We're back a few years before the events of Gilead and Home here, probably at the tail-end of the 1940s. Jack is living in St. Louis, holding down a succession of menial jobs which just about allow him to rent a dingy room in a boarding-house. Despite this he occasionally finds himself on the street if his drinking habits get the better of him. As luck would have it he is looking reasonably respectable when he helps Della Miles pick up some papers that she's dropped during a rainstorm, and senses an instant connection. Only one problem: Della is black, and for all that she's highly-educated and with a respectable job as a schoolteacher, that's still a pretty insurmountable problem. 

A couple of further encounters and an ill-fated first date later and Della happens to find herself locked in a cemetery at night, and who should happen to be skulking around on one of the benches but Jack, who takes it upon himself to look after her for the night. Luckily Jack is a man of some reading and erudition and is able to engage her in diverting philosophical discussion to while away the long hours until the caretaker arrives to open up the gates in the morning. 

And so a tentative romance ensues, though obviously severely constrained by several different factors - obviously there's the whole forbidden inter-racial thing, and it is literally rather than figuratively forbidden, inter-racial marriage being illegal, at least in Missouri, but there is also Jack's own inherent unreliability. Partly there is his weakness for The Drink, but this is really just a symptom of a more general problem: a tendency to deliberately torpedo his own happiness and then try to escape the consequences by fleeing, either literally or by recourse to the bottle. That in turn may be just a symptom of some deeper issues around self-worth and not wanting people to rely on him for anything for fear of letting them down - better to let them down hard and early to get it out of the way.

Jack - the son of a preacher, don't forget - seeks refuge in a church in one of the black neighbourhoods of St. Louis, looking for a couple of things: firstly, some soup, and secondly some sort of homely reassurance that things will be OK. The minister is reluctant to offer this, though, and points out all the ways in which Jack will be ruining Della's life if things continue. 

Of course Della is not some unwilling participant in all of this, and has her own challenges to overcome, particularly her own father - also a preacher, as it happens, and also not especially keen on the whole thing, not out of some reflexive hatred of whitey (although maybe a bit of that too) but more that Della will be letting herself in for a world of hurt and anguish regardless of how respectable and upstanding a white man she happens to choose, and a shifty intermittently-employed drunkard is just the cherry on the cake.

While Della is in Memphis dealing with her family Jack does what he does best and flees to Chicago, where he makes quite a nice respectable life for himself for a short while working at a bookshop, until he happens to mention to his landlady that the "wife" he's left back in St. Louis and who may be joining him later is a coloured lady, at which point he is swiftly shown the door. Having pretty much nowhere else to go, he turns up at Della's father's church in Memphis and is taken back to the family home on the understanding that this is a one-off event during the course of which Della will be invited to make an irrevocable choice between Jack and her family.

Since this is effectively a prequel to Gilead and Home, the reader who's read the books in something resembling publication order will already know that Jack and Della don't get to waltz off together into the sunset, maybe to a state with less draconian laws regarding inter-racial marriage, but instead that Jack turns up at his father's house pretty obviously having left somewhere in a hurry at the start of those two books' timeline (this would be at least seven or eight years later), and that later on Della shows up looking for him. So that knowledge colours the reader's perception of Jack, in particular of how it ends. 

If you were of the opinion that, instead, you wanted to read the books in the order of when they were set, then broadly speaking Jack and Lila happen around the same time (maybe a year or two apart, it's hard to tell), and then there's a gap of maybe seven or eight years (judging by the age of, for instance, John Ames' son in Gilead) and then Gilead and Home happen roughly in parallel. I'm not sure why you would do this, though, to be honest.

What I would say about Jack, as beautifully written as it is, is that I expected to enjoy it slightly more than I actually did. That's because Jack is an interesting character in the first two books, Home in particular, who you feel you want to know more about and who has some enjoyably spiky interactions with his father and siblings. There is a bit of a repeated cycle in Jack, though, of Jack and Della having some delightful stolen moment somewhere, Jack going back to his lonely room and reflecting that actually she'd be better off without him, resolving to confront her and end it for her own good, and then turning up on her doorstep only to find her waiting to reassure him and persuade him to stick around. A few cycles of this process occupy more of the book than they perhaps should, and things which we know happen (i.e. from reading the earlier books), like Jack and Della having a child, don't happen within the quite narrow timescale the book's narrative occupies (probably a couple of months at most). That it's probably the least satisfying of the four books in the series shouldn't be taken as too much of a criticism, as the standard is very high, and I think if you're going to read one (probably in the order they were published, so starting with Gilead) you should probably read all of them.

I very deliberately choose not to analyse my own thought processes in terms of how I decide which book to read next; if I had done so here it might have occurred to me that the title of this book is a shorter version of the title of the previous book in the series, Jack Maggs. I couldn't swear to it but I think the only other example from this list is the pair of Invisible and Invisible Cities, though they were a couple of years apart. That's if you require the shorter title to appear at the start of the longer one, of course; if you relax that requirement you get things like Home appearing in The Road Home and Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant. 

[STOP PRESS: there's also the pair of Transit and Transition]

celebrity lookeylikeys of the day

I've got two for you today, which it seems to me fall into the categories, respectively, Fairly Commonplace and Incredibly Niche, although that is of course partly a matter of perspective.

Firstly, JJ Spaun, this year's US Open champion and unwitting instigator of incredibly laboured punnery (see below), and Jeffrey Wright, fine actor with a wide and varied body of work but pictured here as James Bond's CIA buddy Felix Leiter, solely because while playing this role he happened to have roughly the right sort of beard. 

finally - FINALLY! - after a couple of near-misses, I get to do the YOU SPAUNY GET joke. holing a 64-foot putt for it (with the caveat that he did have a spare one if he'd needed it) makes it even more perfect #golf #USOpen https://t.co/vbe07yEf1l

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) June 16, 2025

I try not to get in my own way too much with a lot of self-analysis once my brain has popped one of these unbidden into my head, but of course when people of colour are involved you have to ask yourself: am I, even entirely subconsciously, Doing A Racism here? I think there are two answers to that: the first one is, well, I can't possibly know for sure, so probably best not to worry about it, and the second is that I'm pretty confident a jury would not convict me of this pair being the most tenuous and squint-requiring supposed resemblance on this blog. Even applying the incredibly restrictive condition of only considering US Open golf champions I think most people would agree that the Lucas Glover one was more obscure. The Webb Simpson one was pretty good, though, although technically he wasn't a US Open champion at the time of the post.

Secondly, American stand-up comic - well, not exactly stand-up, as you'll see if you follow the link - Fiona Cauley and wild warrior woman Ygritte from the TV series Game Of Thrones, as played by Rose Leslie. I should point out that I have never watched an episode of Game Of Thrones, or, as Stewart Lee would have us call it, Peter Stringfellow's Lord Of The Rings. This is partly because I just don't watch TV very much, partly because there's just SO MANY SEASONS of it to get through, and partly because it's firmly in swords and sorcery and Things Of Power fantasy territory, something that doesn't really do it for me, tits notwithstanding. I really am only aware of either Fiona Cauley or Ygritte because some ill-judged clicking on some short videos a while back has unleashed the fearsome power of the Facebook/YouTube algorithm on me and now I get an unavoidable steady diet of stand-up comedy and Game Of Thrones clips presented in my feed, during the course of which I happened to see these two people in quickish succession.